Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Thursday, November 08, 2018

EPA just tossed farmers a lifeline to protect crops

Their names almost make them sound like the villains in an old John Wayne movie: Palmer Amaranth, Tall Waterhemp, and Giant Ragweed.
In reality, they’re among the worst invaders in a farmer’s soybean fields — prolific weeds that rob our food crops of moisture and nutrients, depress our yields, and resist many forms of herbicide.
To fight them, we need the best technology available — and on Oct. 31, the Environmental Protection Agency tossed us a lifeline.
Regulators extended for two years our ability to use a form of a soybean that resists dicamba, a traditional crop-protection product that helps us defeat these terrible weeds. Last year, farmers planted about 25 million acres of dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton. This year, that figure topped 50 million acres, in a compelling testament to the power and effectiveness of these crops...MORE